Wow. These folks should actually be offended. They were selected not for merit, but as props. How nice for the Administration to reduce their identity to their sexuality.

Not just sexual preferences, but to their sins.

America is sending a message “we are a ungodly place” that mocks God

We are not so much a diverse place as we are a sinful place continually rejecting God’s word. Pray for repentance before it is too late for this country.

Just hope the Russians arrest these athletes. If it is illegal and they are there, then they are breaking the law – simple as that

Diversity happens in the sewer. You can’t stop it. Unity in the Truth is the high calling.

We have become a place of tolerance, tolerant to everything but the Truth. GOD is not mocked!

Sickness of soul. Pawns of Satan himself.

Seriously? What does being gay have to do with their athletic prowess? Go as athletes, not athletes with an agenda! And WHY does the FORMER DHS Secretary warrant tagging along? She does in NO WAY represent our country, in any facet, anymore. Send someone that does!

So the homosexuals are going to represent me? Even the communist’s deep in Russia reject homosex. I’d never thought that an atheist like Putin would be standing up for American values!

Obama has to be a closet homosexual. My mother has always said that she believed he was, and now I too have become convinced. I think that the wife and kids was just a cover up to get him elected in politics. Onama is a homosexual.

Now all that is sad.

I don’t think they bothered to read the article. The Obama administration is snubbing the Russian Olympics by not sending any high ranking members of the administration as part of the delegation — the most prominent politican in the group is the former head of Homeland Security — but they are including openly gay athletes, Billie Jean King, Brian Boitano, and Caitlin Cahow as representatives, not competing athletes.

Comments

What else would you expect from the Ham-ster? Bacon? My bet he is just a recording that keeps getting played, over and over. Nothing ever new from him, he’s just a recording. Real or Memorex? Memorex is my vote. Too easy.

That really is a fine specimen you’ve found here. I mean… What exactly does that commenter think… never mind. I especially like the atheist Putin fighting for ‘american’ values bit, and by like I mean, find entirely ridiculous.

Look at these bastards applauding Putin. Putin’s Russia is now a place where people fear for their lives because of the increasing power of the Eastern Orthodox right wing. Where Neonazis stalk and trap children to rape and brutalize for the crime of being gay.

Seriously, fuck these pukes. They probably have no idea just how bad homophobia is in places like Russia, but that ignorance is no excuse.

These are the people with whom the center-philes want compromise. This is the “other side” in American politics – ignorant, greedy, hateful toads decrying even the least meaningful opposition to this generation’s Nazi party. These are the people atheists get compared to with a trite “atheist fundamentalists are just as bad”.

No one should be allowed to forget these horrible people exist, they decide elections, and they are capable of horrible things.

Is this where we say, “Love it or leave it”? If they think Russia and Putin are so great, why don’t they move there.

We should. And I’m sure that this meme will spread to Republican politicians and pundits. They will laud the purity and morality of Putin and Russia while foaming at the mouth at the evils of America and Obama. And the Democrats will only half-heartedly point out how hypocritical this makes them, how “unpatriotic” this makes them (per their own definitions). The Daily Show etc. might bring it up, but the mainstream media won’t give a fuck, and they will continue to exploit the short-sightedness of the American public in order to perpetually argue out of both sides of their mouths. Their actual principles are few and far between. They only consistent in their hatreds.

Oh, but as an atheist Dutchman living in the very religious country Suriname I totally agree with Ken Ham. You see, this country has catholics, muslims, hindus, buddhists and jews all living peacefully together. Guess who try to change that? Bigots a la Ken Ham tirelessly proselytizing. From the USA. Fortunately with little success, but who knows if they persist long enough?
Yes, Ken Ham, very sad to watch American bigot missionaries ATTEMPTING TO INFECT a nice, tolerant multireligous country like Suriname, where atheists can feel perfectly at home without hiding in a closet. Homo’s and lesbo’s are coming out as well:

Actually, Ham is from Australia, and frankly he can go back. So lets blame it on the land down under, you know, “Where the women glow and the men plunder.” (There’s also the line “Where beer does flow and the men chunder” and “chundering idiot” seems appropriate for such a piece of work as Ken Ham.)

As many negative things as I have to say about the Obama administration, this is an absolutely beautiful handling of this situation. The oppression of queer people in Russia shouldn’t go unremarked upon during these games, but our athletes that have worked insanely hard for their shining moment shouldn’t be robbed of their opportunity by a boycott. This allows everyone to compete while still making clear what our position is, that our gay athletes are loved and supported by our society.

Those Xians read the article the same way they read their bible: skimming all but the title and then relying on the strange man with even stranger ideas (and no grasp of reality) to tell them what to think.

Meanwhile, one of the strongest arms of Christianity continues to enable the literal infection of the continent of Africa with AIDS, with it’s outdated and scientifically ignorant stance on contraceptives. I wonder how Ken feels about that.

If this were ’80 and the reason for boycotting was the fear of the spreading threat of communism, everyone would be telling the athletes to suck it up and do their patriotic duty. It’s sick that this isn’t happening now. It’s saying to me that LGBTQ aren’t worth all the disappointment to the athletes, even though LGBTQ are fucking dying, being tortured, being raped, systematically oppressed, denied basic rights, ostracized, beaten… Obama is once again getting away with doing less than LGBTQ deserve yet still getting praised for it.

The long and short of it is that Russia still reaps the economic benefit from this. American athletes and their families and fans will go there and spend a ton of cash which will go back into the oppression piggy-banks. Putin, he doesn’t really give a shit what the U.S. sends him. As long as it includes money, this will not sway him at all. There is no damage done to his country or his pride.

I guess it could be argued that it would show “solidarity” to the TQBLG of Russia, and perhaps embolden them, but really, that seems to me some kind of first world messiah complex rather than something rationally ascertained.

As for it being something rather than nothing, meh. It’s just too much like grandstanding to politically placate based on popular opinion without real commitment from him. I find that more insulting than doing nothing.

– There are many more Ken Ham moments available for view at the touch of a button. Any one of them could be considered funny, at least to anyone who wasn’t raised around his ilk. Having been there, the sight of his face alone instills the same kind the kind of fear, confusion, sickened fascination and abject curiosity in the face of something profoundly yet incomprehensibly alien that I experience in images of the Third Reich. (Godwin’s law not in action here, I am only referring to an emotional / intellectual state for which I personally have no other reference.)
– But there’s a perfect example of it in “Religulous,” when Ham looks at Maher with the eyes of perfect authority and judgement and asks “Are you God?” To which, in the absence of rack, judas chair or catherine wheel, Maher is free to answer no, and live to edit the tale.
– I’m shy of the use of “evil” as an explanation for this sort of thing, because I have an undefensible sense that it’s too easy, too proud, too lazy, too metaphysical, and distancing in way that has questionable effects, but this man and his kind cause me to hover at the abyss of its disuse.

The long and short of it is that Russia still reaps the economic benefit from this.

Hardly. Russia is spending tens of billions of its taxpayers’ dollars on these games. Those expenses can/will never be recovered. It is really just a prestige project for Mr. Putin’s regime, to give him another opportunity to pose as a successful and influential “world leader”. Russia is not in a very good state and will be worse off after the games – and Putin does not care. He is firmly in the “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” school of thought.

I too have to agree with first sentence of Ken Ham and the OP title. It really is sad to see USA to infect the rest of the world.

Around here in CZ there was always plenty of homophobia, transphobia and sexism, and there still is. But we knew little to nothing about creationism/intelligent design nonsense etc. until about 2000-2005. Since then now even some of our catholics are catching second breath and use the apologetic crap that stemmed from american creationist movement. They learn all the tricks, equivocations, logical fallacies, traditional values – in short the whole apologetic rhetoric package – from the like Ken Ham, Ben Stein, Kent Hovind etc.

So yes, it is sad to see America infecting the rest of the world. Only in different sense than Ken Ham means.

Carter did it. How is it unrealistic to expect Obama to do so as well?

Oh, you would have us boycott for an internal and domestic law? That isn’t good foreign policy, and Carter was about Russia invading Afghanistan, which was a foreign policy decision by Russia. You don’t have any perspective. Like I said, there sometimes isn’t a good handle to make such decisions on.

People forget POTUS needs to either build a coalition internally and externally to get actions to occur, to have backing in law. Try to get a boycott past the rethuglican congress. That is what I mean by being able to realistically act. Evidently you have no concept of practical politics.

More right wing fears of “infection.” It’s right out of Dr. Strangelove (Jack D. Ripper): pathetic and funny, but also scary because fascists and genociders like to label their human targets “diseases.”

In fact, the Russian games are a complete fiasco waiting to happen. They were supposed to be held in the Polyarny hills outside Sochi, but then it was discovered that this wasn’t practical.

So, their $12B bid has now so far cost Russian taxpayers over $50B, an estimated half of which is being lost to simple corruption. The main construction of the Games has been awarded in a no-bid process to companies owned by Putin’s close personal friends (like, childhood buddies). The construction includes several stadia which are being built on pure swampland; testing has found no bedrock 170m below ground. The idea was that they would be packed up and moved elsewhere afterwards; this, too, has been abandoned as expensive and impractical.

Also, Sochi is the only, singular, unique place in Russia which is subfuckingtropical.

They’re having the Winter Olympics in the Russian version of Tampa. That seem a good idea to anyone?

So it’s not that Russia will gain from having the games, but quite clearly that they will post a world-beating record loss, one to put the Montreal 1976 Games to shame for their piker level of corruption and mismanagement.

And in the end, it’s the everyday Russian who will be paying for them, for a long, long time. Russia’s edge in cheap natural resources is declining, and Putin’s put all the emphasis of their economy on primary and secondary industry, which is a bad place to be when you’re running out of high-value stuff to dig up/chop down/pump out.

Nerd of RH, I think it was a little over the top to suggest that throwaway has no perspective on whether the Games should be boycotted. It has more than a hint of hetsplaining about it, to tell a queer person that they’re getting too heated up over some silly little laws that imprison people like her (and me) for simply talking about our own existence. This is not, in my experience, like you. I am disappoint.

Nerd of RH, I think it was a little over the top to suggest that throwaway has no perspective on whether the Games should be boycotted.

Fine, opinion noted.

Still, how Obama, without any authority over the US Olympic Committee, goes about organizing and making any boycott work as part of official government policy is practical politics. There are considerations like getting congress to agree makes a boycott very unlikely. I haven’t seen any groundswell of countries trying to form an international coalition for a boycott either.

While it might be emotionally satisfying to see a boycott if one is gay or a gay advocate, if it isn’t practical, why make it a make or break point in criticism? Criticize Obama for what he legitimately could do, but doesn’t. Don’t criticize him for that which is beyond his control.

I think it’s not unreasonable to expect Obama to use that much-bruited bully* pulpit of his to speak out explicitly, rather than just a sort of passive/aggressive “Well, we’re not coming, and we’re sending a bunch of gay people to snub your nose about it” response, as we have in fact got. It would have been a win/win for him: it would position the Democrats more firmly on the side of the current shift in values in the western democracies (i.e., alongside queerfolk), which is a sheer votegetter these days, as well as putting a little tiny bump in the otherwise uninterrupted downward spiral of the US’ position as a respected international moral arbiter on the subject of human rights since 2001.

So for me, no, I don’t think it likely he could make a boycott happen. I think in ten or twenty years, the President could probably manage that by executive fiat**, because I think by then respect for queer rights will be an established principle in government, as respect for race, gender, and other criteria have (at least nominally) become now.

But I do think Obama could be making a much firmer statement about the US’ position on the Russian legislation, and it would be a piece of his legacy confirmed, on top of his turnaround on marriage equality (for most; we poly folk are still pretty much scrod). He should be explicit. If I were running his office, I’d be strongly suggesting that his weekly address, the week before the Games open, include a strong statement in favour of equal rights for queerfolk. Yes, the fundies would go apeshit. But, and more importantly because there are more of them, so would most of the people under 40 in the US.

So I think it’s a legitimate position to be saying that Obama could be doing more; logically, then, it’s also implied that if he could be doing more, then he is doing less than he could, which was the thrust of throwaway‘s argument in the first place, wasn’t it? That he was being cheered for doing (mild hyperbole) the least he could get away with/much less than he could be doing, and that this was disappointing.

* Which I always think was probably meant more in the Teddy Roosevelt sense than the schoolyard mean kid sense.

** By which I mean, “It is the opinion of this administration that to support the Games being held in $NAUGHTY_COUNTRY is not a stance we can take in good conscience, for this reason, I call on the USOC to withdraw the nation’s athletes from the Games.” Or something thereabouts.

@33,@34: I believe there are some atolls out there that are contaminated with fallout from atomic testing. I’ve long entertained fantasies of which public assholes I’d like to see exiled one of them. (Not really!)

Re: other posts. Has any recent (say, last 40 years) Olympics ever returned a net benefit to the local economy? Any that haven’t been a total boondoggle? IMHO, the damned Games need to be, if not discontinued outright, scaled waaaay back. But then I’m totally asportual, so what do I know?

Yes, America is infecting the rest of the world. But the ones responsible aren’t Obama, but your ilk, Ham.

Evangelicalism is making huge inroads around here, and the biggest churches have close relationships with the American ones. It used to be these churches were mostly known for fleecing the flock, but now they’re pushing for anti-woman and anti-LGBT legislation, along with breeding bigots of all stripes. Even creationism, next to unknown a while ago, is starting to make some timid inroads.

That’s what bugs me the most about America’s enamoration with fundamentalism; they’ve become prime exporters of bullshit.

Has any recent (say, last 40 years) Olympics ever returned a net benefit to the local economy? Any that haven’t been a total boondoggle? IMHO, the damned Games need to be, if not discontinued outright, scaled waaaay back. But then I’m totally asportual, so what do I know?

You’re mostly right. Both the Olympics and the World Cup tend to be a net loss for the countries involved, thanks to the parasitary behavior of the IOC and FIFA. They also hate democracy, hence why places like China, Russia (who will also host a World Cup) and Qatar are favored for hosting now.